Ligon Duncan on the Non-Negotiables of the Gospel

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Evolution may or may not be true, but it is not a scientific fact. No one knows for certain whether evolution is true or not, but we certainly do know what is the state of our knowledge. The claim that evolution is a scientific fact is a claim about the state of our knowledge. And while there is uncertainty about evolution, there is no uncertainty about our knowledge.

We all know what the state of our knowledge is and, from a scientific perspective, that knowledge does not indicate evolution to be a scientific fact. Not even close.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Christmas is beautiful time of year celebrated by many, but not by all. This was evident in Richard Dawkin's response to Pope Benedict XVI's message in a piece entitled "A Shameful Thought for the Day"

In this post, Dawkins with utter audacity and unbridled shamelessness, stemming only from the bowels of the very sinful nature he himself seeks to deny, displays none other than the antithesis of godliness as he with full understanding regarding the strategic intent and timing of his release spews forth nothing other than the poisonous spiritual & rhetorical venom of a present day viper who with a dead and hardened heart has inclined and bound himself with unrelenting commitment to opposing, throwing off and trampling without cease the name and glory of his creator and eternal ruler, and in the process is found doing no other than seeking his own glory and trying to build a name for himself among men, which eventually in time and eternity will be seen as not only temporal and sadly displaced, but to have evidenced rebelliousness and treason of the greatest kind, should he not turn and repent before this same God, who even now in the face of all his misdirected acts and ambitions, holds out and displays most openly and vividly especially at this time of year, the most loving and selfless and gracious and sufficient display of divine love and salvation the world has ever known, and yet at present while it's revealed for all the world to see, it lies not only beyond Dawkin's aspirations and affections, but as the object of his profaning and damning imagination and condemnation.

To be simple and brief:
1. Dawkins errs in both failing to understand the method of the propagation and nature of sin and hence fails to see the necessity of redemption. To our chagrin though lamentable, it's laughable that Dawkins would assert it Christian theory that sin (which is of a 'spiritual' origin and nature) is bequeathed and passed on simply by Adam's physical or "bodily semen". While it's true that mankind was changed as a result of Adam's sin (posititionally before God as well as "condition"-ally as we became sinners) and while it's true that in nature both nature as well as genes are passed through conception and birth, Dawkin's fails to recognize both man's federal relationship to God in Adam and in Christ as well as the fact that sin ultimately has meaning only in relation to God. Shouldn't one who is so forthright and venomous in his attack be the least bit careful to understand the opposing position before publicly attempting to criticize and condemn it, especially knowing the worldwide nature of the exposure?

Additionally, if original sin is not true, then why do all men possess the nature of Adam, participate in the acts of the sinful nature, prove powerless to change (apart from Christ) and incur the consequences, even death itself? It's not enough to heap insult at the premise if you cannot as well explain the corollaries.

2. Dawkins also errs and shows blind ignorance when suggesting the manner of God's redemption to be "one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind". Dawkins states "For heaven's sake, if he [God] wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just forgive us?" But to state this is to fail to account for the holiness of God of whom it would be impossible to unjustly turn the eye and fail to reckon with the sin itself. As Paul explains in Romans 3, God accomplished salvation not only in such a way as to be just (i.e., and deal with the sin) but one who also justifies the sinner (which He is able to having provided both forgiveness and righteousness by His own atoning sacrifice and offer of righteousness).

What's clear this time of year, a time when the star of Bethlehem shines so brightly, is that NO ONE should be led astray by Dawkin's present rantings and ravings, the writing of no less than a madman, but rather every reason this season in keeping with the veracity of God's truth and Word points us to the only one in whom both original sin can be dealt with and redemption accomplished by the shedding of blood, that being Jesus Christ himself, who has become for us wisdom from God, that is our righteousness, our holiness and our redemption! May not only the contrast but the attack itself which has been set before upon Christ and Christmas in this example lead to none other than the glory of God's wondrous name, though the redemption and faith of those who believe!

Monday, December 13, 2010

I have no idea of life exists on other planets or not. However, the above article seems to cheapen the miracle that is life, assuming that life can (and necessarily will) emerge from abiotic material just as long as a planet can be found to support it.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Our apologies to our readers for the various LinkedIn and Spam email posts which have been showing up on our blog. We believe the technical issues have now been resolved and apologize for the inconvenience.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Remember Gliese 581g, the Earth-like planet whose discovery scientists announced two weeks back, saying it could potentially sustain life? Bad news: Not only were the initial reports that "the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent" overblown; now, new data suggests that the planet may not actually exist.

Steven Vogt, the researcher who led the team that announced the Gliese 581g discovery (and the utterer of the now-infamous "chances for life on this planet are 100 percent" line, which he clarified was a statement of personal belief rather than of scientific evidence), based his discovery on a mix of his work at Hawaii's Keck Observatory and previously published data.

But the publishers of that old data used by Vogt, who collected it using Chile's High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), have come out with new data which lacks evidence for Gliese 581g.

While I don't agree with the worldview - I do resonate with the logic against "technological triumphalism".

Singularity-level technology changes the world to the point where the things our ancestors wanted are not the same things we want. Today, we are trying to roll back the effects of industrialization. We are trying to undo the damage that penicillin did. If history, real history, teaches us any lesson it's that new technologies do not cause us to transcend. They fix some things, and then cause new problems we hadn't anticipated.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today's most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one's conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The God of the Bible is not merely a First Cause — He is the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all that is, who rules the universe by His Word. Christians must recognize the "God of the gaps" as a false idol of theological surrender. Furthermore, Christians must also understand that any scientific admission of God as a possible First Cause without continuing rule over creation is no cause for celebration. The triune God cannot be reduced to a First Cause among other causes.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

As Stephen became more famous, his associations changed to more and more eminent scientists, which Jane had to admit she did not find appealing. The contrast between her old friends and the world's leading scientists who became their friends (as Stephen became increasingly renowned in his field) was enormous. Their old friends were able to talk intelligently about many things and show a 'human interest in people and situations'. In contrast, as a whole, their new friends were 'a dry, obsessive bunch of boffins', little concerned with people, but rather very concerned with their personal scientific reputations. She adds, 'They were much more aggressively competitive than the relaxed, friendly relativists with whom we had associated in the past' (p. 296). Their old friends' dedication to science verged on the dilettante in comparison with the 'driving fanaticism' of their new friends (p. 296). Jane stresses that she concluded that

'Nature was powerless to influence intellectual beings who were governed by rational thought, [but] who could not recognize reality when it stood, bared before them, pleading for help. They appeared to jump to conclusions, which distorted the truth to make it fit their preconceptions' (p. 312).

Although many other women might have left Stephen because of his intolerable attitude toward her, and especially what she represented, she stuck by her husband through everything. It was he who left her for another woman. She tried in vain to reconcile with Stephen—his terms were, he would live at home with his family for part of the week, and the rest of the week he would live 'with his ladylove' (p. 574). This was unacceptable to Jane. His selfishness and hedonism had shown through again.

I will gladly listen to Stephen Hawking when he holds forth on matters of theoretical physics, but he’s as qualified to talk about philosophical and religious issues as any college freshman. There is a qualitative difference between the sciences, which speak of objects, forces, and phenomena within the observable universe, and philosophy or religion which speak of ultimate origins and final purposes. Science, as such, simply cannot adjudicate questions that lie outside of its proper purview—and this is precisely why scientists tend to make lots of silly statements when they attempt to philosophize.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

We are engaged in a great battle for ideas that Christians understand to be a battle for hearts, minds, and souls. Dowd and his fellow evangelists for evolution are certain that they own the future, and that biblical Christianity will simply fade and disappear. "Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web," he asserts. His conclusion: "This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers."

Well, give Michael Dowd credit for reminding us where the rejection of biblical Christianity inevitably leads.

"If your intention in Saving Darwin is to show "how to be a Christian and believe in evolution," what you have actually succeeded in doing is to show how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender in order to accommodate itself to evolution."

Thursday, August 05, 2010

To me, what is at stake in this debate is not only the potential unhappiness of children, grave as that is; it is our ability to maintain the most basic components of our humanity. I believe, in fact, that we are at an "Antigone moment." Some of our fellow citizens wish to impose a radically new understanding upon laws and institutions that are both very old and fundamental to our organization as individuals and as a society. As Antigone said to Creon, we are being asked to tamper with "unwritten and unfailing laws, not of now, nor of yesterday; they always live, and no one knows their origin in time." I suspect, moreover, that everyone knows this is the case, and that, paradoxically, this very awareness of just how much is at stake is what may have induced, in defenders of those same "unwritten and unfailing laws," a kind of paralysis.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

"If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence....Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter."

I would suggest that the discovery of the origin of matter hardly gives an "explanation for our own existence", unless one were to conclude that we are merely material beings without free wills or rational thought processes, governed only by the determinate laws of nature. But rather than invoke a "god of the gaps" approach, what we have a vision of here is the God of natural law and matter, ie. of everything between the gaps.

"Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”"

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

This is not a joke, but an actual article in the New York Times suggesting that male chimps, by using leaves to attract females to certain body parts, show us an "evolutionary leap" and delivers the "most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem."

"I couldn’t imagine how chimps managed this evolutionary leap. But then, I couldn’t imagine what they were actually doing. Using blades of grass to tickle one another? Building heart-shaped beds of moss? Using stones for massages, or vines for bondage, or — well, I really had no idea, so I called Dr. McGrew, who is a professor at the University of Cambridge.

The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth."

So, how is your self-esteem now? Apparently I don't know what I'm missing.

Monday, May 03, 2010

As I have said - not sure I buy the presuppositions (for the earth to be old, God must be a deceiver) and the conclusions (anyone that doesn't adhere to the Old Earth position is propagating that conclusion), but this is still an interesting study.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

"The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed...The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt, has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings and so been first to fall victim."

I guess either the Israelites didn't eat grain, or were cured by putting lamb blood on their doors.

"But Dr Robert Miller, associate professor of the Old Testament, from the Catholic University of America, said: "I'm reluctant to come up with natural causes for all of the plagues.

The problem with the naturalistic explanations, is that they lose the whole point.

"And the whole point was that you didn't come out of Egypt by natural causes, you came out by the hand of God."

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Quoteable

It is a battle between worldviews, and we are looking to see which worldview can account for itself best. In that battle, there is no neutrality or default position. (August: Circular Reasoning; July 07)

While many in the church today, who having bitten off the principles of the world rather than swallowing the word of God, fail to recognize it, the truth remains that CHRISTIAN SKEPTICISM is not only our great heritage and long standing tradition, but also our Christian calling! (Swordbearer: Christian Skepticism – Our Great Heritage and Calling; July 07)

The key is how the different schools of thought withstand internal critique. Naturalism struggles with internal critique, because it is inductive by nature. Any of its conclusions can be viewed with skepticism, because we can never examine all the evidence in all relationships in all senses. It further refuses to admit to its own metaphysical components. For example, how can the naturalist prove the laws of logic by use of the scientific method, without being viciously circular? It is a metaphysical assumption held to by a groundless faith. (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)

If you say that God is “unnecessary in everything we know about”, how do you know that? Do you know “everything we know about”? Who are “we”? How did you come to know the meaning of the word “be”? You said that you don’t know where the universe comes from. How does that remove the necessity for God? At the very least, it is equally an explanation as any other if you don’t know. So then God is not removed from everything we know about, since the universe had to come into existence in order to exist. (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)

You mean to say that you actually have evidence that the universe wasn’t created? That would be monumental. Can you point us to this evidence? (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)